Colorado town has received pre-orders for 983 drone-hunting licenses
slate.com
slate.com
Well you'd use birdshot, obviously. How does the author think people hunt ducks?
It's a lot like the shoot into the water and the bullet streaks through and wounds people. There was a great Mythbusters that debunked that - the water tears apart the bullet within about a foot of the surface. Yet, once again, the myth remains.
There are a few things going on, but most of it, IIRC, stems from the fact that a bullet fired into the air is almost certainly not fired straight into the air, so it retains it's ballistic trajectory and spin. The spin keeps its air resistance relatively low and gravity does not work against the horizontal component of the bullets velocity. The bullet, fired slightly not straight up, will therefore hit you with whatever velocity it got from falling nose first from apogee, combined with whatever velocity sideways it started with (minus some from air resistance).
Bullets fired from a rifled barrel straight up will turn over and tumble at appogee, and their velocity on return will be only terminal velocity of the bullet tumbling through the air. Presumably this case is safe, though potentially painful.
Birdshot is safe I assume because the mass of the individual pellets are low enough so that air resistance is enough to arrest its velocity to something safe. (also the pellets aren't nearly as streamlined as bullets are anyway, though I wouldn't want to be downrange of buckshot fired into the air at an angle...)
Birdshot is somewhat powerless anyways, at even minimal distances, although I wouldn't particularily volunteer to be on the receiving end.
Ask Dick Cheney's hunting partner how this feels. I believe the doctors were more concerned about a pellet traveling to his heart/brain via an artery (possibly causing a heart attack or stroke) then the damage to his body.
That said, some crazy big game hunters use it for long range shots. WAY too much tissue damage for my family's tastes (as it were, what we hunt, we eat), but it is used.
Hmmm, while it gets into "destructive device" territory ($200 Federal "tax" per round and of course paperwork, which they aren't exactly required to accept), something that explodes with a fuze that sets it off way before it nears the ground is called for. You want proximity fuzing anyway ... send a microprocessor after a bundle of them wrapped in an airframe ^_^.
That said, one might want something heavier for stopping bear, but the ranges involved would suggest something more along the lines of a good 10- or 12-gauge slug than something with enough ballistic efficiency to have a kill potential more than a mile away.
Otherwise imagine all the wasted money they could cause.
Semi-seriously, the two are not mutually exclusive, what's on display, bone, antlers, tusks, fur, etc. is not fit to eat.
Not that I understand the trophy hunting mentality, although the best of them make sure the tasty meat goes to a good home.
[1] like the kind you make for RC dogfighting